Six Ways to Use Video to Promote Your Book (Author Toolbox Blog Hop)

This month’s Author Toolbox Blog Hop article is on how to use video to promote your book. Video can be a powerful marketing tool, and if you are not yet using video in your marketing arsenal, you should be! Below are six ideas on how to incorporate video into your book marketing plan.

1. Book trailers

Similar to a movie trailer, but for your book! Many traditionally published books with a large marketing budget have elaborate book trailers that feel like a movie trailer. Do a search for “book trailer” on YouTube and you will find many of these. While these types of book trailers are going to be too expensive for most self-publishing authors, you can create a less dramatic (and less expensive!) video trailer to tell people about your book. Create an image gallery that showcases your book’s cover image, book blurbs, book reviews, and of course tell them how to buy the book at the end!

2. Book readings

Record yourself (or someone else) reading a section of your book. This can be as simple as a video that shows you reading from your book. Or, you can overlay the audio of the reading onto an image slideshow or another video.

3. Interviews of you

Seek out opportunities to be interviewed about your book or on your book’s subject matter. Some examples would be interviews on blogs, a local news station, or radio. Ask if they will let you have the recording of the interview to use on your own site. If not, you should be able to link to their recording which they will likely have on their website or on YouTube. If the interview was audio only, turn it into a video version by having background imagery, such as a slide show of photos of you or the book cover.

4. Interviews with other authors

Look for published authors in your genre that share the same target market as you and ask to interview them about their book. Ideally, these authors would already have a decent following on their social networks. If possible, have them do a face-to-face video interview. If not, use video conference software, such as Skype, that they can join using a webcam and microphone on their end and you do a side-by-side video recording of the webcams. Post these onto your own blog and ask the author to share the interview to their social platforms. Their readers (which are also your target market) will come to your website to view the interview. While on your website, and as part of the interview, they will be exposed to information about your book and potentially pick up a copy.

5. Video podcasts

Create video podcasts that you put out on a scheduled timeline. These would be you in front of a webcam speaking directly to your audience. Talk about your book, your writing journey, what has been going on in your life, or your thoughts on current affairs. Make it relevant to your book and things your target market would be interested in hearing.

6. Recorded webinars

If you have a book that is instructional in nature, such as a business or self-help book, create a webinar that shares some of the information that they may find in your book. This can be done with a webcam recording of you speaking, a screen recording of you demonstrating how to do something on the computer, a slide show presentation, or a mixture of any of these. They do not need to be live webinars; a recording that people can watch when it suits them is fine.

Share!

Once you have a video, be sure to share it! Create a YouTube channel and upload all your videos there. Then embed the YouTube videos on your website and share to your social platforms and your email list.

Have you used video to promote your book in another way or have an idea to share? Post it in the comment section below!

For next month’s Author Toolbox Blog Hop, I will be showing you how to create video content. I will go over the equipment you will need, software, tips and tricks, and more.

Self-publishing specialist with over 15 years of experience, speaker, and coach. In my spare time, I can be found reading, hiking, taking photographs, riding my motorcycle, spoiling my three rescue cats, and decorating the Jera office with my collection of vintage typewriters.

Video is SO underused by authors, and I get it because we’re all shy folks, but that means those of us who do it stand out a lot more! I’ve recently started my own vlog/video podcast and I’ve already learned tons in the month I’ve been doing it.

Next up – video interviews! I did my first one last week and was SUPER AWKWARD so clearly I need more practice.

Thanks for these tips Kimberley, I’ve started a YouTube channel and started posting videos in the hopes of building a following for when my book (hopefully) gets published 🙂 I hadn’t thought of doing some of these kinds of video, I’ll have to give them a go!

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